MaryRuth's support evolution from tool chaos to team excellence

"There was no resistance. [The CX teams] just took to [Gladly]. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen"

Jim Rodden
Chief People Officer, MaryRuth’s

MaryRuth's Organics had more than doubled order volume since 2022, but their customer service team was trapped in operational chaos—constantly switching between four disconnected platforms that made helping customers feel impossible.

The challenge

MaryRuth's had evolved from a DTC startup to a multi-channel powerhouse, but their infrastructure hadn’t changed much. The 45-agent team juggled separate platforms for each channel, eventually being forced to handover all order management matters to Shopify.

While Jim Rodden, chief people officer at MaryRuth’s, who also oversees their CX teams, did one-on-ones with agents and realized just how poor the experience was for them, he noticed that his team was still delivering a great customer experience. His team was a powerhouse but they weren't getting what they needed to excel.

“It was entirely reactive," he explains. "We didn't do anything proactively, it was just painful. It was so hard for them."

"The agents had to go to a different location to handle each medium which made things very slow," Rodden remarks, who brings 25 years of CX experience to the wellness brand. "There were times where we were missing phone calls or missing chats because somebody was focused on email and we couldn't move them over quickly enough."

The fragmentation created many operational failures. When customers reached out via multiple channels, these became separate conversations in different systems.

"If somebody called us and we didn't answer the phone and then they emailed us or they texted us, those were three separate conversations […] I had no real metrics that merged what an agent was doing so I couldn't see any efficiency or how they were spending their time," Rodden added. More critically, the broken systems were taking a human toll.

The business impact was equally tough. They had to forgo QA and analytics programs because everyone was too overwhelmed with reactive support to invest in strategic improvements.

The solution

Rodden had tracked Gladly for years, having first heard about the platform a few years prior. Fast-forward: when he arrived at MaryRuth's, the alignment was clear.

The evaluation came down to Gladly versus another enterprise platform. He still recalls the pitch the team came to him with, an idea never done before: Gladly, unlike other players, was solely focused on the customer experience. Rodden went on to describe it as the CX industry finally having a platform built for and by CX people, where the customer was not the afterthought but truly front and center.

Three non-negotiable integrations sealed the decision: Shopify for order management, Recharge for subscriptions, and Stella Connect for customer surveys. But the real differentiator was philosophical.

"Other solutions are ticket based and very impersonal, and it's all about just clearing out a queue," Rodden notes. "With Gladly it's about the conversation and making sure that the conversation and the customer are front and center."

The implementation

The team planned an 8-week deployment. What happened next defied everything Rodden had experienced in his 25-year career.

"I'm moderately technical at best, but I was able to do most of the Gladly build myself. We finished all our prep work in less than four weeks," Rodden exclaims. The team went live in mid-June instead of the planned mid-July launch. But the surprises didn’t end there for Jim.

His team had prepared for typical deployment struggles, especially preparing themselves for the frustration and operational challenges that come with overhauling systems. Jim even sent videos and Slack messages preparing them for potential challenges.

Instead: "Day one launches and I'm checking with the team and they're like, 'Yeah, it's fine.' Day two: 'Okay, so what are we seeing? Are we seeing any issues? What are your concerns? What's broken? What's not working?' Nothing. Crickets."

By week's end, one-on-one conversations revealed the same response: "Yeah, it's easy."

They tore down four legacy applications to deploy Gladly, and the transition was easy and simple.

"I've never seen a team absorb a new tool as quickly as the team did. It speaks to the Gladly training, but also just how easy the tool is to leverage."

Jim Rodden
Chief People Officer, MaryRuth's

The results

Immediate operational gains

With Gladly's unified conversation view, what were previously separate interactions become one seamless thread. When a customer called after sending an email, agents immediately saw the email front and center, eliminating duplicate work and the 48-hour email response time.

Strategic capacity creation

The 35% efficiency improvement freed resources for impossible initiatives. With Gladly, Jim was able to build out quality assurance and analytics programs that hadn’t existed before, and could finally eliminate redundancies the team had to handle manually.

The consolidated data enabled breakthrough insights. Using Gladly's topic reporting, the CX team began identifying and spotting customer trends even before operations could see them.

AI that customers love

MaryRuth's developed "WREN" (Wellness Recommendation Engine), their AI assistant powered by Gladly Sidekick. When they launched Sidekick Email, resolution rates immediately jumped from 11% to over 30% in the first week, delivering instant and dramatic improvement.

The results improved further as MaryRuth's customized WREN to reflect their brand values.

"The most surprising thing is how human WREN sounds. It doesn't feel like a canned answer or AI-generated response, it feels like a real human answer," Rodden observes. "More than anything, the kindness that we see from WREN is really interesting as well."

The AI quality is so natural that customers often don't realize they've transitioned from AI to human support, with some positive feedback actually attributed to responses that agents never wrote themselves but simply approved from WREN's suggestions.

"Sometimes the feedback is super positive. We go back and the agent actually never said anything. They just hit send on what WREN was already working on," Rodden notes.

From cost center to revenue driver

The unified conversations enabled advanced retention efforts, with the team achieving a 20% cancellation save rate and generating three times the cost per contact in revenue.

"We're not trying to save for save's sake, we're trying to save the customer experience part," Rodden explains. "We're finding what's wrong and then we're getting them into the right product or the right cadence. 'How often should you get your subscription?' or 'hey, this wasn't the right flavor profile for you. Let's get you pineapple instead of coconut.”

Scaling without breaking

MaryRuth's handles dramatically increased complexity with remarkable efficiency. The team has grown from 45 to 57 baseline agents (scaling to 80+ during peak seasons) while more than doubling order volume and expanding across new channels.

The transformation validated MaryRuth's core philosophy that small improvements compound into transformation. "We built an entire brand training module for the entire company based on the work we did with the Gladly team because it forced us to think through how we speak as a brand, as a company in general."

"We're not just a label on a bottle that could be anybody else's label. We're a real brand with real people," he concludes. "That's what keeps people coming back to us."

For Rodden, the success represents proof that the right technology amplifies human connections rather than replacing them—enabling MaryRuth's to scale their authentic, personalized approach without losing the human touch that defines their brand.

Ready to transform your customer experience like MaryRuth's? Learn more about Gladly's customer experience platform and discover how we can help you deliver radically efficient and radically personal experiences.